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As Founder and CEO of CurveSetter Tutoring™, the very first thing I tell my bright students is that, in order to truly succeed, they must practice discipline,maturity, and balance towards their academic work.

When you enter college, you are suddenly (and finally) stripped of the enormous amount of rigidity and routine that defined your high school years. The daily 8AM to 3PM regimen is replaced by a block schedule in which lectures usually meet for one or two hours at a time, twice or three times a week. For the most part, this means that you are left with unparalleled gaps of free time with no one to tell you how to spend them. While this may seem relieving on the surface, if such time is not used wisely, the loss of a well-defined structure may prove to be detrimental to your academic career.

Such freedom must be matched with adequate discipline because your professors will only expect a higher level of mastery within a shorter period of time. In order to meet such demands and derive a deep yet efficient understanding of the lesson material, you must be willing to reinvest those raw hours that were invariably cut from your schedule once you started college. The advantage of college is that you have much more flexibility and freedom to establish your own schedule, but at the cost of ambivalence and poor performance should you begin to slack off.

Of course, this does not mean that you have to devote your entire day to reviewing notes, re-listening to lectures, and working through examples in order to succeed. College is about finding a balance and I believe that the best way to do so is to set aside a couple of hours each day towards each class. The rest of your afternoons and nights can be devoted to social events (which are arguably as important as your academics) and extra-curricular activities. If you implement such discipline on a consistent basis, finals week will be a breeze because you have already put in all the necessary work and a only cursory review of the material will be sufficient to attain high marks.